Big files are hard to deliver. What files right now are big. And turned out the big files were video game PC See demos. So we contacted a bunch of PC publishers and next thing you know, we had the top ten PC publishers as clients. We’re delivering millions of files. We took away the challenge of the 95th percentile, which basically was like a variable cost to deliver, and we gave them a fixed cost. And so, you know, that began my experience, you know, in the data center world, in the bandwidth world, I learned a lot more than I really wanted to know about that whole world. But, you know, now in my current role, that’s actually serving me quite well. So Gigex, Gigex was born, and then again, we were a cloud company ten years before cloud. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 13:36
No one knew what a cloud was back.
Mark Friedler: 13:37
Then. Yeah. Yeah. So we said, well they’re like, well, you know, are you going to put hardware in our back room? You know, where is the server? We’re like, no, we’re going to give you a link and you click the link and you know something’s going to happen. And it was like people like people didn’t get it. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 13:52
Lots of explanations.
Mark Friedler: 13:54
A lot of explanations. The sales process was hard. Everyone understood internet advertising. So I went out and acquired a content company called GameDaily that was a business to business newsletter. And then we built a consumer brand of the same name and we’re like, let’s go sell advertising. And then if you buy this amount of advertising, we’ll give you our download service for free. So that’s the way that worked. And that actually lubricated the business model. And in fact, you know, you and I mentioned Verne Harnish earlier and I was at one of his events with Jim Collins, you know, talking about good to great. And Jim Collins said something about you have to disrupt yourself before you get disrupted. And that was kind of the epiphany for me to be like, well, you know, the market’s going to come at us, let’s us, come at us first. So we changed that model. GameDaily as a brand became the number one traffic gaming site in the US and measured by comScore. And we ultimately were acquired by AOL, which was then a division of Time Warner. So we became the gaming brand of what was then the world’s largest media company. So that was super exciting.
John Corcoran: 15:12
So in this time period it also was nine over 11 and the.com meltdown. You’re heavily into tech at this point in time. What was that like for you? Did that affect your company at the time?
Mark Friedler: 15:25
Excuse me? Yeah, we definitely had two near-death experiences. I mean, we had closed our funding literally the day before the stock market crashed in 2000. So we, you know, the money was wired into our account, so we were okay with money, but it was. Yeah, it was a grind. And then, you know, in 2005, 2006, you know, the, the, the tail end of that, you know, Silicon Valley, the San Francisco area was, you know, it was hard. A lot of companies were closing down. A lot of companies, you know, had crazy expenses and weren’t profitable.
And I remember getting into, you know, a pretty big conflict with our lead investor who said, you need to spend more money because the more money you lose, you know, the better off you’re going to be. And to me, that just felt like intrinsically, my limbic brain said, no, that is wrong. Like, I want to build a real business, right? And so we were a profitable business. I mean, we weren’t as large as our competitors, but we weren’t losing money. So in those times where it was lean and you just couldn’t raise money, we were fine. But a lot of other technology companies, you know, learned that lesson the hard way and, you know, disappeared.
John Corcoran: 16:44
I want to ask you also about someone who has founded multiple companies and you’ve also worked inside of large companies. And a lot of people that I interview, especially entrepreneurs, really struggle with that, especially after their companies are acquired. They struggle to go work within the company that acquired them. How do you think you have managed to do that?
Mark Friedler: 17:07
Yeah, I think number one that I would give my advice to entrepreneurs is that I think the toughest part is really, you know, dealing with your own identity. Right. You are the founder. You are the CEO. You know, now we were part of AOL that acquired, you know, ten, 20 companies a year. And I was now reporting to somebody who I wouldn’t have even hired, you know. Yeah. And it was hard. And also the corporate culture was like meeting after meeting after meeting. And, I finally said to my boss, “Look, you know, I’ll be at meetings where you need me that are important.
But if I’m in all these meetings all the time, you know, I can’t get anything done. Let me, let me do what I need to do to build the business. Which is why you acquired me. And if you really need me for me for something, I’ll be. I’ll be in a meeting. So.
John Corcoran: 17:57
And that sounds quite tactful today. Is that how you said it at the time, or. Or was it more, you know, abrasive at the time?
Mark Friedler: 18:06
Looking back on it, I’m sure it was more abrasive. I mean, I’ve mellowed. I’ve mellowed over the years, but. Or, you know, it.
John Corcoran: 18:13
Sounds quite reasonable the way you say it.
Mark Friedler: 18:14
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, at the, you know, this guy, he was a nice enough guy, just, you know, I didn’t want to be a jerk about it, but there were just so many other things going on. And then, you know, also when you’re running a business, it’s still smaller and you still have control. You know, you can control the culture, which is incredibly important, right? We’ve spoken about culture a lot with entrepreneurs, with ego all over the place.
So building and executing a great culture is so vital. And when you get into a big, you know, company, your culture is subsumed. I mean, you can try and be, you know, this way or that way. Like, you know, when I was at Oracle, there was a company that was acquired and the founder was big into CrossFit, and he insisted on having a CrossFit gym, you know, in the office for his employees. So that was the way he kind of kept the culture, you know?
But it’s hard as you become part of a larger company. And, you know, I think the advice I’d give to people is kind of, you know, look out for the opportunity where you can make a mark, you know, how can you be an intrapreneur? Is it now you’re part of a bigger company? Can you come in and take on something specific, or do an initiative that’s going to bring value to the champion, the person or people who said, hey, let’s go acquire your company, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, there are a lot of people in these big companies that you can work with. It can be helpful further down the line. And if you’re a good person, if you help them and if you help the company and if you’re not an asshole, you know that that will go a long way.
John Corcoran: 19:51
So one of the themes I’m hearing here is that you were involved in a lot of these companies on the bleeding edge, like bringing chocolate chip cookies to a place that had never experienced them before. You know, early tech companies, early internet companies, early gaming companies. And then you got involved in blockchain and crypto. So let’s talk a little bit about that. How did you end up getting involved in blockchain and crypto?
Mark Friedler: 20:15
Yeah. So in the early days of crypto, a lot of the early adopters were gaming people. In fact, you know, a friend of mine, Brock Pierce. Back in the day something called Internet Gaming Exchange, which was a marketplace where you could buy items that were hard to value, like World of Warcraft, swords and characters. So I think that was really the precursor, having that sort of exchange that kind of foreshadowed what was happening in Bitcoin.
So a lot of my friends who I worked with over the years got into that. I believed in the ethos of decentralized, you know, democratized Payments and currency and finance. So it made a lot of sense to me. And it also felt a lot like, you know, the early days of the internet, which were like, hey, this time I’ve seen all the mistakes I’ve made. What if I could kind of go back to the 1990s, but have the playbook?
And that’s why I felt around crypto and blockchain. So I did a bunch of different things, advised several companies, ran business development for an exchange, and then actually ran corporate strategy for Anheuser-Busch, helping them on the non currency side of using blockchain for, you know, tracking shipments, track and trace for, you know, onboarding of supply chain people. So I’m still interested in that. But I’m not you know that I’m it’s not my career. I’m not active in that right now. You know, it’s very volatile. It’s exciting. I still think there’s, you know, a big future for digital currencies. But, you know, there’s also a tremendous amount of fraud and, you know, all sorts of craziness.
John Corcoran: 21:51
I mean, so in the last couple of years you had FTX and, you know, different, you know, exchanges that failed rather spectacularly. Blockchain went through another crypto winter and then is back up again as we record this in late 2024. It’s now higher than it’s ever been. Do you think that some of those applications that you were talking about, like tracking shipments, do you think that those sorts of applications will continue?
Mark Friedler: 22:18
Yeah, I think, you know, I think the idea of kind of like a distributed ledger of not having anyone have the monopoly of truth is a good thing. You know, you think about companies where massive fraud was, you know, created and there was no one looking at the books. You know, you think about blockchain. It’s kind of like, you know, a third ledger, which is a publicly inspectable ledger. So you can see every transaction, every Bitcoin that’s bought or sold is public.
You can see it in real time. Same thing with Ethereum. So I think yeah, there are a lot of use cases for enterprise blockchain that are not currencies. I think Bitcoin is kind of, you know, the decentralized kind of store of value. Bitcoin hasn’t yet proven that it’s moving counter-cyclically, you know, to the stock market or to gold.
But, you know, it’s a hard asset, meaning that there’s only ever going to be 21 million of them. Probably 20% of all the bitcoins are lost forever because people have, you know, lost their keys. So, you know, and now as we come into 25, the incoming President Trump has talked about creating a Bitcoin reserve in the United States. And if the United States does that, then all the other countries are going to have to follow suit. So I mean, just pure supply and demand, if you think about it’s a scarce asset, they’re not making any more of it.
All the largest trading companies and banks have already, you know, set up bitcoin trading platforms. You know I think the demand for bitcoin is just going to increase. And I think ultimately the price of it is going to increase. You know there isn’t a whole lot of utility yet for Bitcoin itself. Ethereum is a lot more, you know, usable because it’s, you know, smart contracts a lot of different.
You know, platforms are also quite good like Solana or Avalanche or, you know, these sorts of things. But they’re, you know, thousands of different protocols. And, you know, like a friend of mine says who runs a great crypto podcast called Invest Answers. You know, he says, you know, the winners take most. So I think it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. Those currencies are going to be the most, you know, interesting and valuable in the long term.
John Corcoran: 24:44
Yeah. I want to get to what you’re doing now with helping other mid-size companies to evaluate their technology options. But before we do that, almost a year ago last April, your son was almost killed in a horrendous car crash. Talk a little bit about that impact and what that was like for you and your family.
Mark Friedler: 25:06
Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, I was away on actually an EO retreat. We were in Arizona and I got a call from a person, you know, a number that I didn’t recognize. It turned out I said, who’d call me? You know, Sunday morning at 730. And a woman on the line was like, I’m with your son. He’s been in an accident. Let me put him on the phone. And I’m like, oh, he’s on the phone. He must be okay.
Turns out the woman who saw the crash pulled over and she saw my son’s car go off the road, hit a berm, fly 150ft through the woods, crash into some small trees and bushes, flip over a river and land on its roof and slide down to the river without actually going in the river. Miraculously. And then unfortunately, when he crashed through a fence, there was a large metal pole like, you know, this far around that that went through his body on the right side but miraculously avoided his, you know, vital organs. His lungs didn’t break any bones. And so the first person on site was a nurse.
Her husband called in the Life Flight CHP from the time of the accident. He was actually in the operating room within an hour. And so it was a miracle the car, you know, was going very fast, like I said, landed on its roof. It was a Tesla. It did its job. The car was totally destroyed. But besides being impaled by that metal pole, he had no broken bones.
John Corcoran: 26:36
Incredible.
Mark Friedler: 26:37
So it was incredible. And the woman.
John Corcoran: 26:39
Did the woman hand him the phone, thinking that he was a goner. And just like, giving you the opportunity to talk to him. What was that like?
Mark Friedler: 26:47
You know, I don’t know. I don’t know, but like, he was conscious when she got to the car. He was hanging upside down. You know, you know. And he undid his seatbelt and he twisted around to come right side up. So he was like, you know, a chicken on a spit, you know? He flipped. So he was on the right side. He was right side up. But, you know, luckily the, you know, first responders got there.
They cut him out of the car and they had to extract this metal pole from him in surgery. But you know, everything happened so quickly. And you know he had a tough recovery. He was home here convalescing for like six weeks. He was able to walk in his college graduation. And, you know, amazingly, he’s made a full recovery. And I think we all were just really so grateful that, you know, in the blink of an eye, you know, everything can change. And, you know, we know that kind of as a cliche, but it really was true. And, you know, I really kind of had the big epiphany of like just having him sit on the couch and being here, and we don’t have to say anything. Just having him.
There was such an enormous gift, and to me, that really was just a wake up moment to be like, just be incredibly grateful for the mundane, everyday stuff. You know, don’t scream at your kid because they knocked over a bowl of whatever. It’s like, whatever, you know, they’re here with you sort of thing. And, you know, unfortunately, I know plenty of people who’ve had, you know, terrible losses, you know, in their families. And we just were incredibly lucky that he’s with us. And, you know, he’s just graduated. He’s now looking for, you know, his first role out of college. So, you know, I’m just I think I’m a lot more humble, a lot more grateful, you know for sure.
John Corcoran: 28:42
Yeah. I remember I met your son at an event about a month before that. So, so devastating to see the news when it came out. I remember seeing the pictures that you shared and it was just. Yeah, it does make you grateful for sure.
Let’s wrap up with you talking a little bit about some of the work that you do now. So helping midsize companies, giving them, you know, looking at some areas that maybe companies, as they grow, they don’t go back and look at, you know, what their technology stack is costing them. And it can be significant. These things kind of grow and you don’t notice it.
Mark Friedler: 29:16
Absolutely. I mean, most people don’t realize that the cost of technology in their business sometimes is the largest cost, oftentimes the second largest cost. And I’ll give you an example. Like when two companies merge, you know, how do you make sure you’re on the same communication system. Do you think everyone has the right security protecting the company?
If you’re in the cloud, how many licenses do you really need? How do you optimize that? You know, we have a client now that the cost of their public cloud, you know, like in AWS or Google Cloud or Azure. This particular company, their costs went up 1,000% in a year because of so much usage. So for them, the right answer is not just being all in on a public cloud, but having some stuff in the private cloud, some stuff on a public cloud.
So we bring in subject matter experts that help them basically do an audit and look at what they’re doing and give them advice, objective advice on what would work. So we have over 300 partner vendor companies we work with. We’re agnostic as to who they choose. We just want you, the leader you know, to be happy. And so we’re offering, you know, midsize and enterprise companies, you know free technology assessment.
They can just, you know, send me an email [email protected] or see our website. And, you know, we’re happy to help you think about the different things going on, the different options that are in the business and help you be smarter about that and plan. Plan for the future. And we do that from a business owner’s perspective. We’re not like, okay, the best technology is this or that.
Well, the best technology. Quote unquote may not be the best fit for you. Right. And for example, now everyone’s talking about AI. You know, one of the first great implementations of AI is around, you know, customer facing stuff like in a contact center. So now a lot of these contact center products have automated agents that can help customers in a really friendly way, not press one for this or two for that. Right. They’ve really come a long way. So, you know.
John Corcoran: 31:30
In this short period of time, I’ll add, because there are so many different platforms now, the first line of customer support that you get is some kind of chatbot or something like that. And frankly, I’m kind of surprised when they don’t work that well because so often now they seem to work well right off the bat.
Mark Friedler: 31:49
Yeah. And I think a lot of that is because, you know, a lot of people are hesitant to try something new, which is understandable. But I mean, when you see one of these products working and helping, you know, helping patients in a medical office make, you know, make appointments or change appointments in a way that feels human or, you know, communicating with you how you want. You might want a WhatsApp message your colleague might want to text. Someone else may want a messenger, someone else may want a voice.
So having that kind of omnichannel ability to communicate is essential. And you know, at the end of the day, customers care about how they’re treated by a company. And it’s unacceptable for someone to be, you know, on hold or not getting an answer or not be able to, you know, get something resolved in a world of social and instant, you know, Twitter and you know that that can really be damaging. So I think those are the types of things that, you know, companies really need to think about and invest in.
John Corcoran: 32:54
Mark, this has been such a great, so great hearing your stories and everything. And I’d like to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of giving guests the space to acknowledge anyone that’s been helpful in their journey, especially peers or contemporaries. Who would you want to shout out?
Mark Friedler: 33:11
Yeah, there was, you know, this company I went to work with in New York, you know, the Co-founder, his name was Christian, and, you know, he was from Switzerland. And he gave me a shot. I really didn’t know anything about it. How am I going to work in an internet company? I barely knew what the internet was or how to spell it sort of thing.
And he gave me that shot, and then he and I went off and did a V-Cast. And then we did Gigex, so I mean, without that first opportunity, I really wouldn’t have taken that kind of entrepreneurial technology path. And, you know, for that I’m always grateful.
John Corcoran: 33:45
So cool. Mark, where can people go to learn more about you and Gigex?
Mark Friedler: 33:49
Yeah, so they can find anything they want about Gigex at Gigex.com.and I’m [email protected]. My socials are primarily LinkedIn. You know I keep most of my stuff to business. I do a little bit of stuff on X. Not a whole heck of a lot. But yeah LinkedIn you can find me there. Instagram is kind of, you know, silly stuff, travel stuff. But yeah, happy to be of service to anyone out there. And you know, also as a passion project, you know, I work with some CEOs. I advise, you know, a couple CEOs here and there, you know, just as kind of part of my giving back. You know, because I love helping people build and scale and do great things and do things they’re passionate about.
John Corcoran: 34:31
Mark, thanks so much. Thank you John.
Outro: 34:36
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.